Backlight for Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) refers to light sources used for illuminating an LCD from the back. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are usually used as such light sources, because LEDs provide wide color gamut, a tunable white point, a high dimming ratio, a long lifetime and environmental compatibility. Nevertheless, the features such as color and brightness of high-intensity LED vary according to thermal and aging conditions, leading to significant degradation of performance. As a result, optical feedback control has been used in LED backlighting systems to minimize color and brightness variation over temperature and time.
In addition, a large number of red, green, and blue LEDs are assembled as LED backlighting units for large-size LCD displays. White light or dynamic backlight is achieved by color-mixing these LEDs of primary colors: red, green, and blue, which are usually localized within a certain area of the whole screen.
For LEDs manufactured from different production bins, the intrinsic characteristics are inconsistent and the aforementioned variation in color and intensity may occur to different extents. Therefore, spatial non-uniformity in color or intensity may be visible over the backlight unit. Such spatial non-uniformity is considerable for dynamically controlled backlight, where backlight of a certain area is emitted only by a certain color of LEDs. In a two-dimensional dynamic LED backlight, an LED is driven depending on the image to be displayed. LEDs responsible for different areas of the screen are usually driven to provide different colors and brightnesses. As a result, the LEDs experience different junction-temperature variations, leading to further spatial non-uniformity.
It is difficult to ensure that all LEDs selected for a primary color of a backlight unit have the same characteristics, such as color, brightness, and driving properties.
Non-uniformity also exists intrinsically after long-term running due to the variation in rates of degradation between LEDs of different colors and LEDs of the same color. Again, all LEDs of a backlight unit cannot be easily ensured to have the same variation of characteristics over temperature and time.
Optical feedback control is being adopted in backlight units. However existing systems disadvantageously only monitor and adjust a backlight unit as a whole and do not solve the problem of spatial non-uniformity due to variation of characteristics on individual LEDs.
A need exists for a feedback control system to monitor the light output of each light source or block of light sources in a backlight unit. Further, a need exists for a system to provide adjustment against the variation of characteristics.